reviews / official stuff / pancakes

Thank you to everybody who participated in the Halloween Makeup challenge over on the Shiro Facebook page! Everyone who submitted a look will receive at minimum a $5 gift certificate, except for the category winners shown below who get a bit more. All participants, please email me at caitlin (at) shirocosmetics (dot) com to claim your coupon codes!

(Please note: in order to most effectively share the love, one person cannot win more than one category. In the event that a person would have won more than one category, that person was assigned the win for the prize of greater monetary value and eliminated from the running for the other.)

To celebrate 2000 “Likes” on the Shiro Cosmetics Facebook, we had a contest for Pokemon-inspired makeup looks! The following have won gift card prizes – please email me at caitlin@shirocosmetics.com for your code if one of these is yours. All entries may be viewed here.

Hello everybody! I’ve made some changes to the older Shiro collections, so here’s a post of all the old colors and which ones correspond to the new names or have been discontinued. If a color is not on this list, then no changes have been made to that color.

And that’s it! Full-size jars of all discontinued colors will be available on sale on my website within the next two days. They will be $3.50 each instead of the usual $5, available for at least a couple of weeks, and if you just can’t live without it then two jars would probably be enough to last a lifetime. ^_^

I just started a Shiro Tumblr page, and the goal is to post one eye look every day. Variety is awesome, so rather than just posting my own eyes all the time, I’d like to be able to use fan-submitted photos as well. So, that’s where all of you come in! Consider the “Comments” section of this post the dropbox for any photos you’d like to submit. Here’s how it’s going to work:

1) You post your photo(s) here – close-up shots of eyes are preferred
2) I choose photos from this page and post them on Tumblr
3) For every photo of yours that is chosen, you’ll get a $5 credit to spend on anything you like at shirocosmetics.com!

And, some rules and submission guidelines:

1) Only Shiro Cosmetics eye colors may be used. Other brands of eye liner, mascara, primer, et cetera are fine.
2) Please include a list of the colors you used, the name that you would like to be credited for the photo, and a link if you would like the image to click through to your site.
3) By posting your picture, you are giving me permission to post it on the Shiro Cosmetics Tumblr page if I so choose, and to edit it in any of the following ways: resizing, cropping, blemish removal, and color and tone correction.
4) I reserve the right to choose whichever photos I like, or to choose none at all and post a look of my own instead.
5) There are no limits to the number of times you can win. Hooray!

If you like Shiro Cosmetics on Facebook (and if you don’t, you should, otherwise you could miss out on awesome stuff like this), you already ought to know about the 500-fans Dinosaur giveaway. When I reached 500 fans, I asked what I ought to do to celebrate, and somehow we all came to the conclusion that I ought to send people dinosaurs. I purchased a dozen toy dinosaurs from the Internet (pictured below) and told people to enter to win by emailing me a dinosaur poem.

I promised to post all the entries on my blog, even the ones that didn’t win – so, with no further ado, here are the runners-up!

Christine K.
They capture our imagination,
They eat pesky lawyers
Maul annoying theorists
And even scare little kids!
They’ll run amuck in parks,
Abandoned bases and San Francisico;
And somehow, manage to eat a whole ship’s crew –
Without leaving the cargo bay!
Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous;
Obviously everyone will agree,
The best dinosaurs came from three.
Triceratops, Tyrannasaur, and the largest sauropod;
The most violent species, good god!
From fossils and paintings,
Speculation and rantings,
Silly names and stutterings;
Dinosaurs are awesome.
…Why did I ever stop wanting to be one when I grew up?

Violet R.
little plastic dinosaur,
you sit up on my shelf and roar.
you attack my army men,
and sometimes barbies ken.
I’ll get a bunch more of you at the 99 cent store!

Katie M.
Taller than the trees, he stomped
Crushed the weak beneath his feet
Tyrannosaurus Rex, he was their king
Or at least, the one the rest feared most.

Do you think he wore a crown?
No, archaologists don’t believe.
Prehistorically, they found nothing
Not a shred of evidence that he was King.

He may have been the tallest,
He may have been the meanest,
And he may have eaten everything.
But now, Tyrannosaurus is gone…

Prehistory isn’t all quite gone
His bones are preserved in stone
We found them, the bones of this king
To display in a museum honorably.

Christie B.
Dinosaurs look big, mean and scary
I didn’t get close to see if they are hairy
They have big teeth to eat chomp on meat
I don’t think stilettos will fit on their feet
Some are short some as tall as the skies
But all Dinos look best with Shiro on their eyes.

Valerie S.
When you became extinct, what were you thinking?
Or did you have a thought at all?
“Oh no, the dinner is burning – oh no, here comes a great ball-”
Maybe there were no thoughts, just flames and smoke,
A mad dash to escape, but there was no hope.
What I would give to have just one of your kind,
a Tyrannosaurus, a Brontosaurus, just one would be fine.
But no, all we have are remains set up in stone,
no heart, no personality, only bone.

Kimberly D.
Great pterodactyl,
once upon the breeze you flew,
now in memory.

Lacy S.
Little girls like ponies,
And little boys like dogs,
Dolls and trains and bears and planes,
Cops ‘n’ robbers, playing pogs.

But me, I always liked the best
Gnashy teeth and cutty claws,
Spiky backs and long long necks,
Dinosaurs were all there was!

To tell the truth (I can’t believe
I’d ever tell the whole wide net)
When I was young I’d be Littlefoot
And a fruit-roll-up Tree Star try to get.

I love them still! I can’t deny
The many stuffies that I yet own,
They are the best, these dinobeasts
To cuddle up when I’m alone. <3

Ashley T.
A T-Rex and a Velociraptor sit and drink their tea
the T-Rex says to the Velociraptor: “You’re not as pretty as me.”
“But WHYYYY!?” asks the Velociraptor, its heart all filled with woe
“Because,” replies the T-Rex, “Your makeup is not from Shiro!”

Kaitlyn D. – Gilly the Dinosaur
Gilly the dinosaur was round and blue.
He loved his meats and his vegetables too.
But favorite of all, even more than a shoe,
Was a sawfish named Wackett he met at the zoo.

Colors were Gilly’s favorite to play.
With blue, red and yellow he mixed all day.
Wackett liked sparkles so she’d always say,
“THIS NEEDS MORE GLITTERS!” and sprinkle away.

In this way they made lots of cool dino things,
Like shadows and blushes and nice shiny rings.
When Gilly was shimmery up to his wings,
They wrapped all the colors and tied them with strings.

Wackett helped Gilly with all of his chores,
They picked up their toys and they swept all the floors.
They cleaned all the colors from windows and doors,
And when they were done they ate lots of smores.

Carol C.
All… you… sucker Rex-ees ain’t got nothin’ on me,
On my three-horned-face, you can’t touch Tricera-T!
Got a frill round my head, but ain’t Elizabethan, stat –
The late Maastrictian days are where it’s at.
I’m Triceratops!
Wyoming watch out, I loved your crops
And I would’ve had more if the weather didn’t flop.

But watch out, world, I’m not gone forever;
My bro Spielberg resurrected me in the theater.
At Disney’s Jurassic P, the kids are my homies.
When they see me they be all up like:
“Ooh, Tricera-T!”

**The following are the top three, and something extra will be included with their dinosaur packages, hooray!**

Third Place: Nicole S.
Here is a poem that I’ve written
Of a dino with which I am smitten.
It’s unfinished, I fear:
For it would appear
Dromiceiomimus
Has no practical rhyme-us

Second Place: Lauren V.
“Dinosaur, oh dinosaur!
A large and frightful thing,
With sharpened teeth of twenty score,
And rough and slimy scales galore,
In colors bright as Spring.

To battle you will often go
All clad in garb of gold
With knives, machetes, and a bow
Atop your head that you did sew
From skins of warriors cold.

Your sense of fashion, far and wide,
Is known to be quite grand –
Your wigs are beautifully dyed
And you would make a gorgeous bride
To any in the land.

But waste no time on men
Who may be uncouth in their speech,
Or those unskilled with sword or pen –
And if they should disturb your zen,
Snack on them like a peach!”

First Place: Kimberly D. – An Ode to Dinosaurs
Prior to the dawn of man there walked upon the earth,
those fearsome beasts and bird like beings which Dr. Hammond birthed.
Oh dinosaurs, we call your name and wish that we could see,
your height, your size, horrific eyes and damn big scary teeth,
Yet your remains until this day lay buried in the earth.

Unless, by chance! We find a way to extract DINO DNA then sadly I remain,
unable to pronounce your names, Pachycephalosaurians.
Oh dinosaurs, oh dinosaurs! Ye who suffered such a fate,
a meteor by chance, or lo? The theories can’t relate.

It’s probably about time I updated this thing considering I’ve released two new collections since the last business-related update, huh? I suppose there’s not much point in “introducing” the Legends Collection, which has been around for months, but I can tell you about last week’s latest (and greatest?) release: Intertubes!

Intertubes are basically a combination of all of my favorite things about lip products. They’re moisturizing, non-sticky, long-lasting, slightly glossy, flavored, colored (usually), and nerdy. They come in those adorable little oval tubes and the labels are waterproof. They’re also vegan – no carmine and no beeswax. However, there the similarities end: some of them stain for all-day color and some of them don’t. Some are opaque and some are sheer. Some have long cats* and some do not. Therefore, for the sake of accurate consistency in all listings, I decided to call them Tubes of Win.

The vegan-ness actually presented me with an interesting dilemma during the formulation process. Even though my products are vegan, I myself am not, and I happen to absolutely love the feel of beeswax in lip balms. Most of the vegan lip products I’ve tried which use candelilla or carnauba wax are too hard for me, and apply too thin and oily-feeling. I decided to go with candelilla wax for my Intertubes, since it has a lower melting point than carnauba wax and was therefore, I figured, slightly more similar to beeswax. I then used the wax in different proportions with shea butter and jojoba oil until something fantastic happened: I found a recipe that feels very similar to a beeswax-based balm. Achievement unlocked!

(Please note that all claims made in the previous paragraph about the nature of various waxes are based only on my personal experience. I’ve liked the feel of almost every balm I’ve tried which contains beeswax, and have been iffy on every balm I’ve tried where candelilla or carnauba wax is used and beeswax is not. OBSERVATIONAL SCIENCE.)

So, those are the Intertubes! Now on to the next thing I wanted to post about…

People have been increasingly concerned lately that naming my products after Nintendo’s characters is a violation of their trademarks. There are a number of reasons I’m unconcerned about being sued by Nintendo, but I also don’t want to make anyone nervous or upset for any reason, and making the names more subtle does appeal to me on a few different levels anyway. So, I’m going to be working on renaming most of my Super Effective and Legends collections over the next few months whenever I have time (ha). When I start changing the names over, I’ll post a list of what everything has been renamed so that you’ll be able to locate your old favorites easily. If this makes you sad and you favor the old names, you can… I don’t know, send me a conversation when you order and ask for yours to be labeled as they were originally. Sure.

Oh, and one last thing! My turnaround time at the moment is up to 7 business days, which is kind of long but still (I think?) within the boundaries of a “reasonable” turnaround time for an independently operated, handmade business. Recently I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries from customers after 6-8 days of their order as to where their packages are, and a lot of these inquiries come one or two days after I’ve already shipped their package out. I always send a conversation via Etsy on the evening that an order is placed to let you know when I’ll have it out and, if you live in the US, I’ll give you a tracking number as well. Sometimes Etsy doesn’t send email notifications to let you know that you have a conversation, so please check that out before asking me about your package – thank you!

Hello, ladies. Look at yourselves. Now back to me. Now back at yourselves. Now back to me. Sadly, you aren’t me. But if you stopped using other scented bath and beauty products and switched to DarlingClandestine’s Tilt-A-Whirl perfume oil, you could smell like me!

First, a short introduction. DarlingClandestine is a shop on Etsy which stocks earrings and handcrafted fragrance oils. The owner is an amazingly wonderful person named Evonne, who is one of those people who is so ridiculously nice that you can’t help but want to BUY ALL OF HER THINGS RIGHT NOW. I’d bought perfume oils from her in the past and was always super-impressed with the quality, extremely low prices, fast shipping, and generosity with regards to extra samples.

If you read Ana’s interview a while ago, you might recall that my signature scent is/was Imp, by Haus of Gloi. It’s a super-sweet and fruity mixture of apricots, passionfruit, grapefruit, and mimosa blossoms. It’s more like candy than fruit, and occasionally seems to teeter right on the brink of being overwhelmingly sweet. Although I really do love the scent, I decided that for daily usage, I’d like to have a scent that was still fruity but more subdued and a bit more tart. So, I asked Evonne if she’d be willing to make me a custom scent with notes of orange, passionfruit, and sage. She ordered the necessary oils that very day and shortly came up with Tilt-A-Whirl, which is OUTRIGHT AMAZING.

Tilt-A-Whirl starts out with bright, tart orange. This isn’t candylike at all; it’s literally like you’ve just cut into a beautifully ripe orange. The scent is sweetened with subtle passionfruit (again, fresh and candy-free), and mellowed with herbal sage. It’s basically my perfect scent, and all of my family members (who thought Imp was overly sweet) think it’s wonderful as well.

So, if you want to be an awesome person and support an awesome person and smell like an awesome person, go check it out! You can get a 1/2 oz amber bottle or a 1/3 oz roll-on for just $9, which is a remarkably wonderful price for liquid awesomeness.

I’m one of those sorts of people who can only work efficiently under a deadline. So, in order to motivate me to get stuff done, here’s what I want to do by the end of the year. Please feel free to be helpful by getting on my case if dates are coming up and I’m still being a lazy bum!

September 20-30: Blend large amounts of Super Effective colors. Order more ingredients where necessary; order at least 600 more full-size jars.

October 1-7: fill 5 full-size jars of every color; save for the Friday on Fremont event. Plan to bring all the extra jars for restocking on the go.

October 8: Have all new colors finished.Currently completed: 12/30

October 8, 9: Participate in the 2nd Friday on Fremont event. Sell stuff. Make money.

October 10: Take photographs of all new colors. Format them during the following week.

So I’ve been going over my income and expenses and whatnot, and I’m going to be making a few very small changes to my current pricing structure in order to help with financial viability. The following changes will be going live on Friday, September 10, 2010:

-2 of my current bulk pricing sets are going to be modified. Under the new bulk pricing, you can get the following discounts:

10% off 5+ colors (this is unchanged)

15% off 15+ colors

20% off 30+ colors

-Free shipping over $35 will no longer apply to international orders. I’m really sorry about this, but orders over $35 generally cost me around $10 to ship overseas, and it’s tough to pay that entirely out-of-pocket. The $3.50 flat rate will still apply.

I apologize for these changes, but there have been a few times recently when I’ve ended up losing money for several hours’ work, and I can’t continue to do that. I believe the prices are still very fair and competitive (the changes are honestly very small; depending on what you’re buying it shouldn’t make more than a few dollars difference from the way it was before), and I’ll also be running reasonably frequent sales.

Thank you all so much for your support! Please don’t hate me now, okay? :c

So… September 10! Grab stuff in the next couple of days if these changes are going to affect your purchases.

By the way, a bit of good news… the new collection is coming along swimmingly, and I’m still on-track for a mid-October release. ^_^ So excited!